Format: Netflix
Viewing: First
Director: Alex Hardcastle
So, it's impossible to talk about this movie and just talk about the movie.
First, let's get it out of the way - this is a movie that was never, ever intended for me. So proceed with caution.
Second - this is the first I've seen of Rebel Wilson in a while, and, yes, she's worked hard to reduce, as we once said. She always looked terrific, and she continues to do so (that is not her actual body in the poster above, which is weird). Rebel Wilson is all about the eyes and smile, and so long as those don't change, we're good.*
A teen Australian girl (Angourie Rice) in Maryland circa 1999 decides she must become popular, and sets out with a vision board to do so. By the end of her Senior Year (natch, and 2022), she is competing with Tiff for who is most popular, she's stolen her rival's jocko boyfriend, and is planning on becoming Prom Queen. En route, she's sidelined her pre-popularity friends. However, she's dropped during a cheer stunt and goes into a coma for 20 years, waking in 2022 - and now Rebel Wilson.
For her, 20 years ago was yesterday. For everyone else, they're adults. Mary Holland is now the principal at the their high school, Sam Richardson the librarian, Zoe Chao her rival, and Justin Hartley the ex-boyfriend. Wanting to reclaim her life/ finish what she started, she decides to do her last month of high school.
There's the usual "I'll sit with the geeks and gays and recognize they're really the good ones" stuff of these movies, and the realization of what's really important, etc... I don't really even need to say anything about it, because you can guess how this goes if you apply Rebel Wilson to this weirdly tropish formula. That's not a knock. It's fine! It's funny! But I will never, ever have to watch this movie again.
This film, despite having an adult in high school, never quite plays directly with the trope of Drew Barrymore or whomever returning to high school as an adult and getting a do-over. Which I guess is good. The dynamics in those films is always... weird. But so are the dynamics here.
The joke of a teen coming back to life as a 37 year old is not bad. Casting Rebel Wilson as Rebel Wilson doing this is not a bad idea. But I'm not sure the joke here quite works. I'll ignore the stuff the movie ignores - because this is not a movie about someone doing 12 months of speech, physical and occupational therapy as well as seeing a counselor to understand their place in the world. But it felt like the writers/ filmmakers never quite complete the thought on any of the set-up.
Wilson's character is too oblivious to be a fish out of water at the school and never really deals with it in even a comedic way. I think there's literally one joke at her expense for being older than everyone else, but it passes immediately. There's essentially no impact and the kids treat her like she's 17. She isn't around adults who don't know her, so being a 17 year old in a 37 year old's body also never pays off on that end, either. Her now-adult friends talk to her like she's 37 and are in no way creeped out by the discrepancy, and while she responds like a 17 year old, she also responds... like Rebel Wilson? Which we're all kind of used to here in 2022 AD.
There's comedy value inherent in all of of this, but instead we get sucked up in a plot that I'm not sure works, anyway. And we certainly don't ever get to ask "is it ethical for 37 year old men to court/ attempt to sex a 17 year old who has been asleep for 20 years?"
Here's where we start looking at the gears and my personal bug-a-boos. Again - I didn't hate this movie. But.
As a 47-year-old, I'm 10 years older than the main characters in the film. I was an adult and married by the point in the story where our teen goes into a coma. High school was already 9 years in my rear-view mirror. There's a narrowcast of the film for people in middle school to people about 40. And that's fine! Movies are allowed to do this. But it also means I have an inevitable barrier-to-entry when they show the teens and their take on high school in 2022, which is of course all about social media, influencers and whatnot, and I have no barometer for how real or true any of this is. They may as well be showing me a story about waking up on Mars.
But as the movie is also about the quest for popularity - the seeming only topic about high school since the American Pie movies or so - it feels both stale and untrue. Like, I don't know who hurt the kids who wound up in Hollywood, but I have no idea what the actual hell they're talking about when it comes to an obsession with a clique and entering that clique. Maybe that's just me. Maybe it was framed differently when we were coming up. I don't know. But longing to be loved by in an "in crowd and therefore everybody" is and was and shall be a meaningless distinction. A desire to be "popular" just for existing may be something that gets kicked around in business circles where the goal is fame. I just find it kind of... pathetic?
I'm not saying it's necessarily untrue, writ large, and no one ever sought popularity. But in a world where it *seems* like anyone can become insta-famous for a YouTube channel, it's maybe not weird how many movies are now about "we will be cool" or whatever. It just seems like, hey, enough. We've done this plot as comedy, drama, melodrama, vampire movie, what-have-you.
It's just all a pretty far cry from movies that felt like they came from a truer place with Lloyd Dobblers, Jon Benders, or the River's Edge kids just getting by. Even teen comedies like Summer School may have had a "popular" kid, but it was just a type. And usually coded for "they have money and good hair." And, honestly, even Sixteen Candles - which definitely had a popular clique and outsiders - wasn't about a desire for popularity, it's a desire for Jake Ryan. The nerds aren't really looking to enter the clique, they're fine. Even Farmer Ted thinks he can pass between both worlds - and he does, sorta. There's minimal friction here.
I don't know how else to say it - but protagonists whose initial endgoal is popularity feel like a black hole of plot and like someone sharing a moral as basic as "sharing is good". We've seen the story before. There's only so many variables. And It makes the story of the film the learning of a basic lesson maybe for middle schoolers more than even a 15 year old.
And then the fantasy really winds up as our hero both (a) actually becomes popular AND (b) rejects the supposed laurels of popularity once obtained. And that by casting off popularity, they become even more popular/ happy because who they really were as a nerd is their best self or some shit. But it still celebrates popularity. Popularity and everyone loving them is still what the lead earns at the end.
It's kinda fucked up.
That said - look, I didn't *hate* the movie, I just thought it was kind of not sure what it was, like the thing got away from them. But the people in it were good!
*my god, I've just doomed her to an accident leading to a faceless existence
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